Resize a VirtualBox guest Linux VDI Disk under Windows Host

Resize a VirtualBox guest Linux VDI Disk under Windows Host

My Linux VirtualBox guest OS often runs out of space – I never learn that to build anything in Linux, you need about 10 times the amount of space that you think you need. Also, VirtualBox recommends very small default values, so it is easy to be caught out.

Anyway, here are the current steps to re-size a VirtualBox disk, where Linux is the guest OS and Windows is the host OS.

In this example I am using VirtualBox 4.2.6 (The approach is valid with more recent versions also). The host OS (the one that is running VirtualBox) is Windows 7 and the guest OS that I wish to re-size is Ubuntu. Please backup everything before continuing as something could always go wrong.

Step 1. (Optional) Move the VDI file in Windows

If you need to move the VDI file to another location/physical drive with more space, you can do the following.

Press”Storage” on the left-hand side, and under Controller remove the current drive by pressing the red minus. Then Press the + with the hard drive platters.

It should ask “You are about to add a virtual hard disk to the controller IDE Controller”, pick “Choose existing disk” and browse to the location to which you moved your VDI image (e.g. “d:\MyLinux.vdi“). Press “OK”

Check that your image boots before you go any further.

Step 2. Resize the VDI file

Shut down VirtualBox again.

Make a copy of the VDI file – just in case (“MyLinux.vdi” -> “MyLinuxCopy.vdi“)

Go into the Windows command prompt (Start->type “cmd” into the box)

cd to the location of the VDI file that you wish to resize, e.g., “d:\MyLinux.vdi“

At the Windows command prompt, type:

D:\>VBoxmanage modifyhd MyLinux.vdi --resize 100000 this will re-size the drive to 100 GB. Pick a value that suits you. Note, your vdi file will not change in size at this point. The output should look like: D:\>VBoxmanage modifyhd MyLinux.vdi --resize 100000 0%...10%...20%...30%...40%...50%...60%...70%...80%...90%...100% D:\> Unfortunately that was the easy part!

Step 3. Resize the Linux Partition

At this point you need to grow the Linux partition to take up the space of the newly resized vdi file:

Go into “Oracle VM VirtualBox Manager”, choose your Linux image “MyLinux (Powered Off)”. Press “Settings” and under “Storage” when you select your disk you should see “Virtual Size: 97.66GB” for the 100GB that I set and “Actual Size: 18.52GB” if your previous disk was 20GB and now almost out of space!

Unfortunately, if you boot this image at this point the space will not have been allocated to your Linux drive. A “df -k” will make that clear!

In “VirtualBox” Create a new virtual machine, as in Figure 1, and call it “GParted” with Type: “Linux” and Version “Linux 3.8” or whatever version. Choose “Do not add a Hard Drive” and ignore the warning.

Figure 1: Creating the GParted Virtual Machine

Pick your “GParted (Powered Off)” virtual machine and press “Settings”. Choose “Storage” and under “Controller: IDE Controller” add a new CD/DVD device. Browse to the location of your GParted ISO file and select it. Your first item under “Controller: IDE” should be “gparted-live-XXX”. If you have a second “Empty” disk you can remove it. Then add the disk that you wish to resize under “Controller: SATA Controller”. At this point it should look like Figure 2, where HomeOfficeUbuntu is the “MyLinux.vdi” discussed above.

Figure 2: Add the SATA Controller and Disk

Press OK and start your GParted Virtual Machine and you should see it boot (very quickly). Choose Gparted Live (Default settings). Choose all the default settings and your language of choice. Press 0 to start X and you should end up with a virtual machine running that looks something like the output in Figure 3.

Figure 3: GParted Virtual Machine Running in VirtualBox

You can see that there are 78.12GB unallocated and this is the space that we wish to allocate in my case to /dev/sda1 which is an ext4 filesystem and is currently 18.53GB in size.

Now, you should have made a backup of your vdi at this point. If you haven’t go back and do that – so many things can go wrong here and you are on your own!

If it is any partition other than /dev/sda1 you can right-click the partition you wish to resize and choose “Resize/Move” (as in Figure 4) – not in my case!

Figure 4: Resize/Move the Partition

However, my problem is that the extended partition and my linux-swap are blocking me from changing the size of my /dev/sda1/. So, unfortunately I have to delete and re-create them again. So, select the linux-swap and press “Delete” and /dev/sda2 (or whatever your one is!) and press “Delete”. The press “Apply” as in Figure 5 below.

Figure 5: Delete Partitions

After applying the changes choose the /dev/sda1 partition and choose resize as in Figure 6, allowing enough space (“free space following” of 1023) for a new swap partition. It should say “Grow /dev/sda1 from 18.53GiB to 96.66GiB” and it may take a short while (~1 min). Hopefully you should get a “All operations successfully completed” message, as in Figure 6.

Share This Story, Choose Your Platform!

Dr. Derek Molloy is a senior lecturer in the School of Electronic Engineering, Faculty of Engineering and Computing, Dublin City University, Ireland. He lectures at undergraduate and postgraduate levels in object-oriented programming with embedded systems, digital and analog electronics, and 3D computer graphics. His research contributions are largely in the fields of computer and machine vision, 3D graphics, embedded systems, and e-Learning. This is his personal blog site.

Oh my god, I never comment on posts but I love you. I’m from Ireland by the way so super proud to see an Irish guy putting out this VERY useful piece of information. Thank you so much!

One tidbit that had me stuck before I even got to this part. If you need to resize a fixed-size VDI it won’t work. First you need to clone it to a variable size one with the following: VBoxManage clonehd [old-VDI] [new-VDI] –variant Standard

You can not move partitions with resize2fs. So it is always a good idea to place the partitions that might grow in the end of the disks. Best Practice with VMWare and VBox is to create one virtual disk image per partition. Saves you a lot of trouble.

I never moved a swap partition. I delete them and recreate them where needed. I’m doing stuff like that for a living. I maintained a server with a 2TB data volume that we grew 100GB every 2 month and I just did it for the home volumes of some Ubuntu VBoxes.

Thanks for the tutorial but I found out that the third step is overly complicated. Just mount the GParted Live CD on the same machine as the hard drive you want to resize. Then press F12 when starting a machine, press C and proceed. Worked perfectly for me

I am stuck in 3rd step. I tried to add a “New Virtual Machine” and it asked me to with 2 options , 1)Create new hard disk 2) Use existing hard disk and these two options are enabled by a checkbox with a tick saying “Start-up Disk”. If I uncheck it (where both the options will get disabled) and say next, it gives a warning “You did not attach a harddisk to the new virtual machine”. I ignored it as you suggested. I guess I followed your steps correctly till here. Now I added the GParted iso and then added the SATA controller pointing to my resized vdi file. And when I try to boot “GParted”, and I chose Gparted Live (Default settings), after this it just hangs there with a BLACK BLANK screen. I badly need to resize my partition, any suggestions would be of great help. I looked at the GParted website for tips to boot section, but nothing was relevant.

I have been looking for a clear guide on how to do this for a whole day, and most guides stop after the easy step #2. I found your explanations clear and articulate, and you explained every necessary operation without assuming the reader is a big tech wiz, ground-up. Thank you very much for taking the time to create this great step by step walk through to simplify this task. Appreciatively yours Amit

Greg A: If you have multiple snapshots you can just clone the last snapshot and resize the clone using the above instructions. Detailed instructions * In the Virtual Box Manager UI, click the Snapshots button under your virtual machine * Select the last one (ie. Current State) * Right click and select Clone * In the wizard that appears you will want to select Full Clone (on the second screen of the wizard) * Once the machine is cloned you will see that it only has no snapshots, just Current State – follow the above instructions but using the .vdi of the clone

I can confirm that I carried out the blog post instructions against the original (non-clone) machine and it did not work – it booted but was at the original size. I then cloned this machine (which may have some messed up snapshot somewhere due to my failed attempt). I successfully carried out the blog post instructions against the clone, which I now use instead of the original.

Thank you for your tut. My partition is a LVM one, so I did everything instructed. My LVM volume shows up as expected, but my mounted filesystem shows the old size. If you have any recomendation, thanks in advance.

In the 3. step 4.point you do not have to create another VBox machine.

From VirtualBox Manager “insert” GParted.iso into a CD/DVD drive of the machine you’re resizing (Settings-Storage-Add CD/DVD Device; either at “IDE Controller” or at “SCSI Controller”). Then start your machine and press F12 at boot time to change boot device to CD/DVD. GParted should be started now, do whatever you want to, exit from GParted and you’re done.

Derek, Thank you for the very helpful and detailed how to. I ran into one thing that may happen to other people. When I restarted my virtual machine the swap was not on. The problem ended up being that my fstab file referenced the swap by its UUID which changed since we deleted and recreated the swap partition. I needed to find out the UUID of the new swap partition (ls -l /dev/disk/by-uuid), edit the /etc/fstab file to put in the updated UUID information and then reload the fstab file (mount -a). I also issued a swapon -a but I don’t know if that was actually necessary. After that the swap was reported as being active.

strange thing: i followed this guide clicked apply and it all looks good in GParted VM… my changes show up when i restarted GP VM… when i start my server VM its not recognizing the changes i made and shows the old allocation… is this even possible? what’s a likely cause?

…so i tried adding the ISO direct to the VM I i wish to change and boot it via VM… while partition changes appear in my GParted VM on subsequent re-starts they are not showing in the VM. Looks like some sort of cacheing mayhem.

Did you ever find a resolution to the VM not actually showing the increased size in the df -k? All of the steps in this tutorial seemed to work flawlessly, but it looks like I have the same problem you had…

Been putting this off for a while because it’s exactly the kind of thing I would really screw up, but I got it to work with no problem following this guide. It was so detailed and yet easy to follow…thank you so much for putting this together!

I had an 8GB virtual disk, started installing TeX Live, and boing, out of disk space. I knew there should be a way to do the resizing of a vdi, but couldn’t quite get it to work, until reading this blog post. Thanks for a straight forward explanation, it worked a treat.

Great Article, I’d found a YouTube video which involved using the existing VM (with disk size issues) in combination with a Linux ISO, however that involved a much slower process. The use of a blank VM that just boots off of GParted ISO, is far more efficient! Thanks

Thanks, I had to use the tool Logical Volume Management under System->Administration on Oracle Linux 5 to use the free space anyway. I guess i did not need the GParted step since my swap memory was at the beginning of the drive and not obstructing the growth.

This tutorial is just great, step by step, clear and easy to understand. Especially the “trick” with a “virtual gparted” is extremely helpful: I am on linux, my vdi’s are on encrypted disks, so booting from a gparted-CD wouldn’t help – but this way it was just click-click-click… Thanks a lot!

Thanks for the tutorial, it is great and easy to follow. But I’m having an issue, I’m running a ubuntu 12.04 vm on a windows guest, I followed the tutorial step by step and the vdi file it was resized, but when I run the df -k I’m seeing the old space (without resize changes). what I need to do to be able to use the new partition space? This is the result of the df -h: Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on /dev/sda1 16G 15G 308M 99% / udev 2.0G 4.0K 2.0G 1% /dev tmpfs 396M 800K 395M 1% /run none 5.0M 0 5.0M 0% /run/lock none 2.0G 152K 2.0G 1% /run/shm compartidos 298G 199G 100G 67% /media/sf_compartidos /dev/sr0 57M 57M 0 100% /media/VBOXADDITIONS_4.2.12_84980

Hi Derek, I also had the same problem – all the steps worked properly but the new space was not visible. I did some more digging around, and it looks like some additional steps are necessary for systems using LVM..(actually, one of the comments to this thread gave a link to an excellent blog on this.. https://blog.jyore.com/2013/06/virtualbox-increase-size-of-rhelfedoracentosscientificos-guest-file-system/ ) But basically, it seems that if you are on Red Hat, you need to do what you describe above AND the extra steps from that link, and then it works just great..otherwise the changes don’t commit. This worked really nicely for me, but If this is a common problem then maybe it might be worth adding a link to the extra steps at the end of your post? Also, I took the advice of mounting the disk on the main VM and booting to it rather than making a separate machine, and that worked very well for me too… Thanks for all the help!!

The changes were commited, I mean the vdi files lenght is 100GB and if a open it with gparted, it shows the partition as 100GB. But Ubuntu does not recognize the new size. I also tried to create a new partition and it is not recognized by Ubuntu.

Thanks Derek, for the clear and step-by-step tutorial. I think it’s my first time ever that I leave a comment about a tutorial. You just saved my day! My guest OS was not booting and until now I just didn’t pay much attention to virtual machines. The only difference I got to your explanation was that I had first to clone my fixed-size VDI in order to turn it to a variable size.

Thank you , it was so good get this class of help in you web site, in my case I had to use C:\Program Files\Oracle\VirtualBox>vboxmanage.exe modifyhd “c:\users\”user”\virtualbox vms\Directory\Hard Drive PC.vdi” –resize 20000 for the step 2

After I had made the initial copy of my fixed VirtualBox vdi to a dynamic-sized disk, I felt bold, as I knew I had a backup. So I simply installed the gparted directly in the new dynamic copy. I stopped the swap, deleted it, grew the sda1 partion and recreated the swap. It worked like a dream. So at least today you can skip the gparted iso .

I was unable to complete your instructions on Oracle Linux 6.5 because of LVM. However, I was successful once I did the following. Start Linux VM in VirtualBox Make sure you are set up with the latest yum repositories via the instructions here: http://public-yum.oracle.com Execute the following in a terminal: # yum install system-config-lvm ( I was root, so you may have to insert sudo at the beginning like “sudo yum install system-config-lvm” ) Answer ‘y’ when asked. Wait for install to complete Execute the following in a terminal to start system-config-lvm GUI: # system-config-lvm & ( may need sudo again here ) Navigate Volume Groups > vg_xxxxxx > Logical View > lv_root Click “Edit Properties”. The edit Logical Volume window pops up. Click “Use remaining” Click “OK” File > Quit Verify space was added # df -h Shutdown VM Start the VM up again and verify space with df -h

Hello Derek, I posted a detailed, accurate description of the problem I am experiencing with this solution. It was ‘waiting for moderation’ and now it’s gone. What was the problem, have I been violating any rules? Perhaps you can email me a comment or answer. Regards Jan

Hi Jan, apologies I’m not always around at this time of year to “battle the spam” so there may be delays. Unfortunately I don’t know the answer to your question either, but hopefully someone passing through will. Kind regards, Derek.

I actually followed Klaus’s suggestion of using gparted directly inside the virtual Ubuntu, which worked great! The only issue is that I had to replace the UUID for the swap disk on the /etc/fstab in order to use again the swap part.

unfortunately, this doesn’t work here. i have a 32 GB dynamic vdi with a ntfs partition. I successfully used vboxmanage to extend it to 65535 and then a Gparted VM (22.0-1) to assign the new space to the partition. Gparted now shows the partition as 63.22 GiB. The Virtualbox UI shows the .vdi as 64 GB virtual size and 31,52 GB actual size. If I mount the vdi on my fedora host using QEMU-ndb, df -k only shows the old size of 32733180 1k-blocks. If I start the .vdi with virtualbox as a VM (Windows 10 installed), Windows also only knows about a physical 33 GB disk. Any thoughts?

I am trying to do the same. But I am having the following error while starting the GParted: modprobe:”can’t module crc32c_intel (kernel/arch/x86/crypto/crc32c-intel.ko): No such device modprobe:module dm-raid45 not founf in modules.dep missing ‘workdir’ ”

It ignores these erros and carry on for language setting, but the it gets stuck.

Worked for me. Used the VBoxmanage command, then booted up Ubuntu 15 and used gparted to delete swap, delete ext partition, resize root and then recreate swap. Then used blkid on swap to get new UUID to update /etc/fstab. Reboot as safety precaution.

Thanks. Some of the pictures and nomenclature have changed with VB 5 and I certainly couldn’t get it to work with gparted-live-0.24.0-2-i586.iso, only with gparted-live-0.22.0-1-i586.iso. But I got there in the end. I wish all tutorials were as good as yours.

It’s Jan 1, 2016, and this still works like a charm. You made my day, and sort of New Year’s gift :). I followed the instructions using Linux Mint 17.2 (Rafaela) as the guest OS running on Windows 7 host. Many thanks dude!

hi could it work for .iso file also .i Have a ubuntu-15.10-desktop-amd64.iso file and i want to run in oracle vmware while installing it give not enough space as u said to increase the size for .vdi image is there any way to increase the size of .iso image

I copied the swap partiction (copy/paste) at the end of the unallocated space but all in all it was more complicated: I needed, after rebooting Linux, to modify /etc/fstab with the new swap. best is to use “blkid” to find out the new UUID of the partition.

Thank you soooo so much!!! This is a great article, it’s scary to do this process without assurance that it will work. The step-by-step images were very important to make the process easier!

I did not realize I had an LVM, so when I ran df -k in my machine and still saw the old values, I did the process all over again… and still the same thing. For those who see something like “/dev/mapper/ubuntu–vg-root”, you are running an LVM and many comments here point to other articles explaining this part better.

Great tutorial, thanks, it helped a lot! When I tried the instructions I got the blank screen like a few others. The solution was to enable EFI (Settings->System->Motherboard). I suggest to write it in the tutorial.

Very helpful tutorial – many thanks. If your Linux is using LVM, after you have done all the above you have to tell LVM to make use of the extra space. On Fedora 20, the instructions in the ticked answer in the following link did the job for nme.

I tried expanding Ubuntu 14.04 on my Win 10 host. Firstly, VBoxManage didn’t work, so I followed this link to add it to path:https://www.build-business-websites.co.uk/add-vboxmanage-to-path/ The summary of this one is to run the following commands as is as a quick fix (remember Win cmd needs the quotation marks): cd “C:\Program Files\Oracle\VirtualBox” set PATH=%PATH%;”C:\Program Files\Oracle\VirtualBox” This let me expand my vdi in Win.

However, when I tried to run gparted, the GUI wouldn’t show up right after boot, when 0 is entered as the option to automatically start. If X-server doesn’t start, don’t worry. The manual way is preferable, since you know your laptop’s screen resolution.

So if gparted doesn’t show a screen like in Fig 3, just press 2 at the boot prompt to go to command line and type: sudo Forcevideo That would ask you for resolution (default is 2- 1024×768 but choose differently if your laptop has a different resolution). Device driver name for the VGA is vesa (default option). Finally press y for yes (this explanation is given in the boot screen after you enter default choices and language). This should start the GUI.

All went through and my Ubuntu VM showed just 20 GB like it initially was. Special thanks to Declan’s comment, I realized that mine had many snapshots. So cloning only the current state and then expanding this vdi (without any extra snapshots) worked like a charm. Finally got rid of the original and using this one. Works great but there seems to be no workaround for a vdi with many snapshots except to clone it, expand that and move on!!

1. My virtual machine referenced an existing disk that was of fixed size. I cloned this virtual machine to a dynamically-sized machine. Then I was able to resize this clone and deleted the original. 2. The newer versions of gparted did not work on my virtualbox. I used gparted-live-0.22.0-1-i586.iso and all worked fine.

Many thanks! Like others, I had to navigate to C:\Program Files\Oracle to find vboxmanage.exe first using CMD, and then point it at my VHD. Gparted worked like a dream with just the standard right click > Resize. VirtualBox still complained the VHD was inaccessible, but it booted fine and showed the extra space available!

How to merge an primary partition with unallocated extended partition without data loss of primary partition ? In my case I want to extend /dev/sda1 which is ubuntu’s root primary partition. As being root partition it wont be possible to restore backed up partition on newly created free partition so I want to extend my /dev/sda1 without data loss

Thanks very much. Worked perfectly, and I had almost given up on how to do this. I didn’t get the option to have the linux-swap as a logical partition (greyed out), so just created it as a physical partition, and watched nervously as the Ubuntu booted up… … … bingo! Thanks again for this.

Thanks a lot for this tutorial. I try to increase an encrypted Ubuntu partition but it seems that an encrypted partition cannot be resized.

I started GParted.

dev/sda1 is the partition of the Windows 7 host system.

dev/sda2 (File system extended) seems to be the Ubuntu partition. It has the following sub-partitions: 1. dev/sda5 with a red exclamation mark (Filesystem crypt-LUKS) with cannot be resized, only deleted or formatted. 2. unallocated (small).

Then there is the unallocated partition with the increased size.

Can you tell me how I can allocate the space to the encrypted partition?

May I make one silly suggestion? You scared me with ‘Unfortunately that was the easy part!’ — I wasted some time googling to see if there was a simpler way. Then came back here and did it, and the rest of it wasn’t hard at all LOL

Thanks a lot Dr. Molloy. This truly is an amazing article that saves a lot of time when it comes to expanding a drive running out of space. Mistake I did was to create a virtual drive with 8 GB for Ubuntu 16.04 and I had only 200 MB for other installations with a default linux-swap space of 2 GB.

I do have a small issue, after I followed the instruction, the size is increased and working fine. But the VM load-time is almost double. It used to start really quickly, but it’s taking alot of time now. Can you please help me out here.

This article is great! If you delete the swap space, if it occurs between the primary partition and the added partition, and then add it back at the end, you will see an increase in boot time, or you will have to use recovery mode to boot. That is because the UUID of the swap space has changed. You can find the new UUID number of the new swap space by getting its properties when you are in GParted. Then you can recover your short boot time by changing to the new UUID number of the new swap space in /etc/fstab, after you finally boot up again. This link explains how to edit fstab:

I was thinking that is a pitty because does not function for me. I have followed all the instructions. And all is right, but when I check the file system with df -k appears the old storage size.

I have read all the comments. Some of them refer to problems if you have a LVM. I do not have a LVM. Other problems about new version of gparted. I have downloaded an old version and the problem persist. Gparted says is done. Oracle VM says that the size is right but inside the system only appears the old size.

But the last attempt it works. I clone my current vdi from the VM administrator and then start gparted over the new clone vdi. and surprise. The storage was the old. After resize the sda1 and create the new swap ( the same steps that before) start the new clone and the size now is the resized size.

Sorrry, but this did not work for me. Although I followed off of the steps and the partition table looks just like I want it after I received it and added the swap space back, when I boot into Ubuntu that OS does not recognize that the disk has been resized.

I checked the time stamp on the file before and after and the timestamp does not change. The last time I used the disk before trying to resize it was about 11:15 AM and after I resize it and create the new partition table, it still has the same timestamp as if the changes are not actually written to the file

Very helpful article. I used this article as a reference to expand the disk size for a Ubuntu VM. Please also mention that we need to “de-activate” the partition before resizing it. Else the resize option does not seem to work.

Worked fine but with later versions of Linux and Gparted was able to turn swap off the partition when running the live version, then delete it build new partitions add the partition to the disc and then create a swap disc. all worked fine.. i just rebooted and all was well.. Thanks for the assistance..

Just two additions. 1. If you have a ‘fixed’ VDI to start with, you have to clone it to make a ‘dynamic’ VDI

The following error is the indicator (the error might pop up due to other reasons as well) >>> 0%… Progress state: VBOX_E_NOT_SUPPORTED VBoxManage.exe: error: Resize medium operation for this format is not implemented yet! <<<

2. GParted steps can also work inside your guest OS (I tried it in Ubuntu guest). Need not download the GParted ISO and create a new VM.

2. I had created a Virtual Box with Windows 2003 Server (32 Bit) to run Interbase 5.6 database and check on very old datafiles.

This Vbox I had created with HDD space of 20GB. While extracting the data from interbase where some tables have more than 4 million records, I am running out of hdd space in the Vbox. How to do I resize this for Window Guest OS?

Great tutorial, I had almost exactly the same setup. I thought the swap having a different partition (/dev/sda5 instead of /dev/sda2) would wreak havok, but the VM was able to use /dev/sda5 as the swap partition without any modification on my part.

Very useful and clearly explained, step by step. I wasn’t able to launch the GParted virtual machine with the latest version (0.30; some kind of problem with the kernel), but the older ones worked fine. I tried first with 0.21 and it stated ok, but it failed to resize sda/dev1 and asked for a newer e2fsck version. GParted 0.26.1-5 has an updated e2fsck and worked fine! Thanks a lot

Thanks so much for the great illustration and detailed step-by-step procedure! I would also like to let you know that you might supplement your note with one extra step, to manually revise the /etc/fstab file the UUID of the swap partition, otherwise, the resized guest will boot very slowly. This has been torturing me till I ran across the thread https://askubuntu.com/questions/639559/very-slow-boot-with-ubuntu-15-04

I was quite pleased to find this article. I read through it twice and then decided to take a different approach to solve my space issues. I went into Settings -> Storage and added another fixed VDI file as a second hard disk. Then I booted up the OS image, started up gparted and prepped the disk for use. It’s not as involved as resizing, but if you just need some additional storage space, then this might be another option to consider.

In the same VBox, attach original ubuntu iso and re-start. On the first screen, press F12 to open boot menu and choose boot from CD. After it boot, choose Try Unbuntu, search GParted to run it. You can resize the VDI space there. After you done, shut down.

Thanks, a great guide. I just failed to resixe the vdi since it was fixed in size. Got the error message “medium operation for this format is not implemented yet”, and had to resort to the “CloneVDI Tool ” for resizing, after that I could continue with the gparted-live-step.

Excellent instructions! It took me several tries until I figured out to use the vdi file at the path it shows when you hover over the vdi in the details screen, which in my case was a snapshot one. Changing the “base” one did nothing.

Hi, Am stuck at Step 3, 5th pointer trying to add the vdi file to controller. When i click on choose a disk, it doesn’t recognize the vdi file on my machine. I also took a back up of the file in a different location, even that is not recognizable. Any help is appreciated. TIA.

Just adding to the many thank-you responses you’ve already received on this article. Everything worked exactly as you described. It’s one of the best presentations for a fairly complicated process i’ve ever seen. Thanks!

Thanks for this great article, Derek. I just finished a straightforward resizing of my main partition (/dev/sda2), simply adding all the unallocated space to it. df -h reported the same size as when I started. Is there something else that must be done to update df results?

This does not seem to work well if your copy of Windows 10 running as the guest OS is registered and legal. It breaks the registration and renders windows inactive. There seems to be no easy way out of such mess either since your snapshots are also rendered useless. Please correct me if I’m wrong. At least for me – the above was my experience.

Leave A Comment

The "monster" image that is associated with your comment is auto-generated -- it makes it easier to follow the conversation threads. If you wish to replace this image
with a less (or perhaps more) monstrous version, add an image at Gravatar.com against the e-mail address that you use
to submit your comment. Your image will henceforth be used on most WordPress sites. Please note that I will remove any messages that contain blatant advertisement or that refer to
illegal software, content etc. I may tidy up some messages if they contain code dumps etc. E-mail addresses are used only to notify you of any responses, and to authenticate your future comments
on this website -- they are not made public nor used for any other purpose. See the Privacy
and Cookie Policy for a full description. I manually approve all new posts in order to keep the website spam free, but once your post is
approved, all future posts should be automatically approved. Please let me know if your messages do not appear. I really appreciate it when you answer the questions of others on
the page, as it is difficult for me to do so and continue to produce new content. Thanks for your understanding, Derek.

Archives

About:

This site brings together all of the video content on the Derek Molloy YouTube channel and structures it so that you can follow the videos as lessons. It also integrates associated documentation, datasheets and tools to allow you to get the best from the video series. It also has a blog to allow me to post new videos, articles and useful information that may not be in video form